Since I’m on the road on my Harley trike, I felt it appropriate to feature Bob Seger’s anthem “Roll Me Away”. Song really rocks.

The cops came to see me when I was living in Brighton, England, way back in 1971 when I was only 23 years old. Do the math, makes me sixty-nine. My friends and I had been stopped coming back from London in the middle of the night. We had gone up to London to score some hash – unsuccessfully I might add – for an acquaintance of mine who had come from Montreal looking to get some (2 pounds) to take back home with him, by ship. It was about £110 for a pound of hash if memory serves, a £ back then was worth $2.50, so he stood to make a purty penny – roughly two grand – since, hashish was going for about $2500 a pound in Montreal. Don’t forget that we’re talking 46 years ago when the CPI (Consumer Price Index) was around 16 compared to an index number of 100 in 2017.*

*more simply put, $100 in 1971 would purchase goods and services worth around $604 today.
The preceding little lesson on the CPI was brought to you courtesy of LBP (Le Bon Prof)

Now back to the story.
I don’t remember why the cops stopped us but they did, in the middle of the night, and they became suspicious when we told them we were headed for Brighton. Turns out we were traveling in the wrong direction. When we were stopped, we only had tastes of some hash and the two guys I was with in the car had aliases already made up but I didn’t so I gave my real address and name : Gerald Cohen, 11 Adelaide Crescent, Brighton. They came looking for me because they couldn’t find the other guys obviously. Two police and I were talking outside my residence on a warm sunny day and I was so nervous that I was shaking a little, the sun sparkling off the mirrors of my Indian shirt.

My friends had told me that if the cops came looking that I should just lie, saying that I was hitchhiking and never caught the names of the boys (my friends) which is what I did and de fuzz just left.

In the end, my friend didn’t score. All I could get then was grass which cost more in England then than it did in Montreal. My friend managed to score a 1/2 kilo in Amsterdam and got busted with it. He was set up because according to him, he had stashed the dope in a locker in an Amsterdam train station and got busted just as he was leaving the station. They found the key and he received a six-month sentence. He did his time in a jail in Haarlem, Holland, after which, he was deported back to Canada. Donna, my then girlfriend, and I went to visit him in prison on our way to India.

Speaking of India, here are three shots of the solitary Indian holy men, the Sadhus,** as well as two shots of the Sikh Golden Temple in Amritsar in the Punjab state of that massive and enlightening country.

**There are also women Sadhus but I wasn’t conscious of seeing any except in pictures.